FORMER AMBASSADOR: NATO Needs To Help To 'Contain And Isolate' The Chaos In Syria

Immediately after
Syrian mortars killed five civilians in a Turkish border town
on October 3, former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Ross Wilson stated
that the incident "added
a new edge to the campaign [Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip] Erdoğan’s Administration has been waging to convince its
allies and friends that Syria is spinning out of control,
increasingly threatening regional peace and stability, and
warranting a firmer response."

Turkey responded to Wednesday's incident by shelling
parts of Syria all night and passing a resolution that authorizes
sending its military into Syria if necessary.

Wilson told Business Insider that he wasn't
surprised Turkey sent its neighbor "a strong statement that
they're not interested in seeing this happen in the future," but
noted that Turkey shouldn't have to deal with the Syria problem
alone—"NATO needs to do more to contain and isolate this
problem as much as one can."

"The way it's seen in Turkey is that disorder [and] chaos are
increasing weekly if not daily in Syria," Wilson, who served in
Ankara from 2005 to 2008, said. "They are extremely worried about
what the medium-to-longer term future is. Turkey can
defend itself in this kind of border incident. Larger
scale things [are] something else altogether and Turkey is
seeking help."

According to Wilson, Turkey is primarily worried about three big
issues:

1) Chemical weapons: "They seem dangerous
enough to American national security officials, but to Turkey
they're literally right across the border. It's not something far
away that might come to bite at some point in the future. It's a
very immediate and very real threat."

3) The implosion of the Syrian government, which would lead to
"chaos
all over the country, hundreds of thousands of
refugees fleeing for their lives and the implications of
that for Turkey and the region as a whole."

Wilson said that there are clear signs of increasing chaos: the
Syrian government is losing parts of the country, senior military
officers have defected, rebels have
successfully attacked central government buildings and 90,000
Syrian refugees are currently living in Turkey.

"As far as Syria is concerned, clearly there needs to be some
kind of transition [in the form of a interim government] there
and it has to happen soon or the situation domestically is going
to become something akin to that nightmare that the Turks are so
concerned about," Wilson said.

That nightmare scenario would involve a collapse of central and
military authority combined with the "loss of control of these
frightening weapons that Assad and his father developed over the
course of many years." The result would be "catastrophic flows of
refugees [and] catastrophic numbers of people to feed and take
care of medically" in addition to the
destabilization of the entire region.

"It's already an extremely volatile part of the world—it could
get a lot moreso and a lot more dangerous," Wilson said. "It
could be very quickly or it could be sometime off in the future
but it almost seems inevitable that some big change is going to
happen in Syria."

That's why, Wilson told us, it is critical that NATO and its
individual member states "make clear that [Turkey's] security is
an alliance concern" in addition to supporting "Jordan and ...
others who are affected by this instability that ... ultimately
may threaten the whole region."

He said the benefit of doing so is two-fold: it's a way to
contain the instability while also ensuring that "NATO has a
platform, i.e. Turkey, if and when at some point circumstances
develop further in Syria in such a way that either intervention
or some kind of operation on the edges of Syria or along its
borders becomes necessary."

Wilson noted that world leaders have been
wise to resist direct intervention in Syria, but that doesn't
mean Turkey's allies "should be passive with respect to the
overall situation. That's where I think NATO needs to pick up
it's game."

When asked to speculate on what happens next, Wilson said that
it's "almost an impossible question to answer," but did offer a
broad take on the scenario:

"At some point it's likely that the [Syrian] government will
either enter into some sort of transition on its own or it will
collapse. Is that this winter? Is it later? I don't know. I think
it's extremely difficult for Assad to put things back to the way
they were, but when things will play our or exactly how I don't
know."

One thing is certain: Winter is coming. "It will be cold, people
won't have food and what is already a deeply suffering country
will be suffering quite a bit more," Wilson said.